Mooney 201 lands on high power lines in MD

[Will.iam]

On 12/16/2022 at 6:00 AM, Pinecone said:

Historically, in all areas, about 1% of mishaps are unavoidable.  So called Acts of God.  The rest are the result of unsafe conditions (about 15%) and unsafe actions by people (the rest).

The issue is, strangely, there are not enough GA mishaps.  If there were more of them, they would not be news, and no one would notice.

There are 6 MILLION auto mishaps per year in the US.  That is almost 16,500 PER DAY, or 11 per minute.  About 100 people die each day in the US in auto accidents, or about 1 every 15 minutes..  

How often are there news stories about auto mishaps?  Not one every 6 seconds.

^^^^This but i think more importantly it’s also that they don’t have a plane. So they don’t know how safe or unsafe they are. People don’t pay much attention to auto accidents because they have an auto and think oh that wouldn’t happen to me I’m a safe driver, i know how to text and drive. I have heard that last part alot actually. Same can be said about motorcycles. Yes they are more injury prone than being in a car so why would anybody take on that more risky mode of transportation? For one it’s more fun to ride than drive and you can do things to minimize that risk like wear a helmet and ride on dirt trails where there is no cars. 
had a high school girl her brother was killed on a motorcycle and she despised anybody who rode one thinking they were an idiot. We were out at my house and my girlfriend that was friends with her jumped on my dirt bike to go ride and that’s when we got an ear full of how stupid we were. By the end of the night that girl was riding in a grass field giggling and laughing about how easy it was to ride that motorcycle. On one of the passes she yelled it’s like riding a bicycle that you don’t have to peddle. My girlfriend was worried she was not going to stop for hours until i told her relax it only had an 1/8 tank of gas left. When she did finally get off the bike she understood why someone would take the risk to ride a motorcycle and we didn’t look like idiots anymore. 

[Pinecone]

8 hours ago, Will.iam said:

^^^^This but i think more importantly it’s also that they don’t have a plane. So they don’t know how safe or unsafe they are. People don’t pay much attention to auto accidents because they have an auto and think oh that wouldn’t happen to me I’m a safe driver, i know how to text and drive. I have heard that last part alot actually. 

If you poll drivers to rate themselves on a scale of Poor, Fair, Average, Above Average, Excellent, 85% of them will rate themselves as Above Average or Excellent.

I teach performance driving, and it is amazing how bad most drivers are, before proper training.  And those are the ones interested in getting better.

Also, for work, I am a certified instructor for a safe driver system that has been used be some major companies with lots of vehicles.  And what amazed me was, that the stuff they teach, I figured out on my own.   But even after training, many drivers do not get it.

[Hank]

9 hours ago, Pinecone said:

If you poll drivers to rate themselves on a scale of Poor, Fair, Average, Above Average, Excellent, 85% of them will rate themselves as Above Average or Excellent.

I teach performance driving, and it is amazing how bad most drivers are, before proper training.  And those are the ones interested in getting better.

Also, for work, I am a certified instructor for a safe driver system that has been used be some major companies with lots of vehicles.  And what amazed me was, that the stuff they teach, I figured out on my own.   But even after training, many drivers do not get it.

So the Dunning Kruger Effect is real? Guess it applies to us pilots, too . . . .

[aviatoreb]

14 minutes ago, Hank said:

So the Dunning Kruger Effect is real? Guess it applies to us pilots, too . . . .

The Lake Wobegon effect - "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average" 

[Hank]

1 hour ago, aviatoreb said:

The Lake Wobegon effect - "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average" 

I remember hearing a politician say that he would strive until everyone in his city / state / district had an above-average income . . . . .

[hubcap]

1 hour ago, Hank said:

I remember hearing a politician say that he would strive until everyone in his city / state / district had an above-average income . . . . .

Some people are not good at math.......politicians are particularly bad at math. I remember, years ago, one of my supervisors telling me that all of his employees were above average...LOL

[ilovecornfields]

Not to interject too much logic into this discussion but it’s very plausible that a subset of people would be “above average” compared to the population. For example, the average IQ of Google employees is probably higher than the average IQ of the dishwasher or grocery bagger across town. It doesn’t mean one group is better than the other but there is a selection bias present in both groups that makes the average member of that group not representative of the population as a whole.

It’s entirely possible for pilots to all be smarter than average (or dumber). Or for people taking an advanced driving course to be better than the average driver (who didn’t sign up for the course). 

That being said, I agree that most peoples’ confidence exceeds their competence.

[rbp]

37 minutes ago, ilovecornfields said:

Not to interject too much logic into this discussion but it’s very plausible that a subset of people would be “above average” compared to the population. For example, the average IQ of Google employees is probably higher than the average IQ of the dishwasher or grocery bagger across town. It doesn’t mean one group is better than the other but there is a selection bias present in both groups that makes the average member of that group not representative of the population as a whole.

It’s entirely possible for pilots to all be smarter than average (or dumber). Or for people taking an advanced driving course to be better than the average driver (who didn’t sign up for the course). 

That being said, I agree that most peoples’ confidence exceeds their competence.

its called "selection bias"

[N201MKTurbo]

1 hour ago, ilovecornfields said:

confidence exceeds their competence.

I should get that put on a T shirt for my son.

he got an artificial elbow at 24 because he thought he could race an expert snowboarder through the trees.

He has destroyed 4 cars because the cars won’t go around corners as fast as he would like them to.

[ilovecornfields]

1 hour ago, rbp said:

its called "selection bias"

I know, silly. I teach this stuff. It’s in my first paragraph. 

[ilovecornfields]

1 hour ago, N201MKTurbo said:

confidence exceeds their competence.

I should get that put on a T shirt for my son.

he got an artificial elbow at 24 because he thought he could race an expert snowboarder through the trees.

He has destroyed 4 cars because the cars won’t go around corners as fast as he would like them to.

Yeah. When the confidence/competence ratio is > 1 bad things start to happen. Since our frontal lobes don’t usually develop until around 25 it gives us a long time to do stupid stuff before we know better. Some people seem to never fully develop their frontal lobes.

[carusoam]

Sooooo…..

Did you all get the latest AOPA mag (pilot)?

They wrote an article specifically covering this fly-by-wire aviation accident…

I think we covered the basics here…

Anyone see anything that stood out?

1) Low IFR

2) Difficulty begins at the start of the approach, gets deeper trying to follow the approach…

3) Ends with scud running

4) Follows up with interviews with the local media 

5) Sam Bankman Fried must have used this accident for his own guidance.

 

Read the article… if you aren’t grumbling for a reason… you must have a great inner calmness…. 
 

If you haven’t read the article/mag… don’t leave it around for non-flying family members to see…

Flying has a lot rules to follow, for a reason.  Even Mav was given a hard deck, and caught hell for disregarding it…   

Best regards,

-a-

[Yetti]

On my transition training I asked the Navy Cmdr at the end "if I was safe".   He said something about above average of the people who come to Mooney Safety School and yes you are safe.   He said "always be airline smooth"  and also I know he requires you to always be on the centerline landing and taxi. So Flight Reviews if the nose wheel is on the ground it better be on the centerline.   I have a row of rivets on the cowl that line me up perfectly on the centerline.  While they are simple concepts, they require a great deal of precision and practice to pull of constantly.  The other interesting part is there are less pilots than PHDs in the USA.   So then you have a very small part of the population needing to be very accurate in their hobby. 

[Yetti]

Which when you think about it means the system that is set up is broken.   Is this not what the PP training and the Flight review is supposed to prevent?  The pilot that is not so good and needs to get better.

[Jerry 5TJ]

1 hour ago, Yetti said:

1 hour ago, Yetti said:

Which when you think about it means the system that is set up is broken.   Is this not what the PP training and the Flight review is supposed to prevent?  The pilot that is not so good and needs to get better.

If I fly as an instructor with a pilot who demonstrates a lack of skill combined with a lack of ability to improve (for any one of many possible reasons) then I don’t fly with him again.  I do not have any way to stop him flying, tho, and I doubt many would want a CFI to have that authority. 

[amillet]

44 minutes ago, Jerry 5TJ said:

If I fly as an instructor with a pilot who demonstrates a lack of skill combined with a lack of ability to improve (for any one of many possible reasons) then I don’t fly with him again.  I do not have any way to stop him flying, tho, and I doubt many would want a CFI to have that authority. 

I believe I flew with you at the Santa Maria PPP last year.  You signed off the FR and IPC so I hope I’m not one of them

[Yetti]

14 hours ago, Jerry 5TJ said:

If I fly as an instructor with a pilot who demonstrates a lack of skill combined with a lack of ability to improve (for any one of many possible reasons) then I don’t fly with him again.  I do not have any way to stop him flying, tho, and I doubt many would want a CFI to have that authority. 

So we all agree there are pilots that should not be flying because they are going to bend metal and possibly themselves.   There is a system set up that is supposed to keep that from happening, but in reality pilots once they have their ticket are free to do as they please.   So why make the rest of us go through the steps if in the end they don't work?

[FlyingDude]

On 1/10/2023 at 10:12 PM, Pinecone said:

If you poll drivers to rate themselves on a scale of Poor, Fair, Average, Above Average, Excellent, 85% of them will rate themselves as Above Average or Excellent.

I teach performance driving, and it is amazing how bad most drivers are, before proper training. 

How do you define "good driver"?  If you are into performance driving, then you are focusing on "driving".  However, drivers out there - who btw got their licenses at the age of 16 after riding bumper cars - get punished and rewarded (by law enforcement and insurance companies who deploy OBD spy devices) for not-accelerating hard, not-decelerating hard, not having lateral accelerations in curves, as well as counting to 3 at stop signs and braking at yellow lights.  So, they may be perfect drivers by those standards and yet completely suck at "driving".  

Similar parallels can be drawn to flying.  We build a rating mechanism based on the feedback we get, and that may end up diverting from an objective rating.  Furthermore, we may select the feedback we want to get.  I for one, as a CFI, have been not-favored (let's not say fired) by some magenta-line-followers when I asked them to do manual flight planning.  The guy was entering the flight plan on Foreflight, with the magenta line from mid-field here to mid-field at destination.  I told him to reset it at TOC, while leaving the pattern - couldn't do that.  I asked him "what's our bearing"?  Couldn't answer - and I told him that at various Class D airports tower asked me what my bearing would be after take-off, or I got bounced around and had to resume my magenta line.  I said "let's just nail these down the next time" - so I wasn't even demanding manual planning, just asking him to use his magenta line properly -> he went and got his BFR from some other guy. Etc etc. 

[Pinecone]

4 hours ago, FlyingDude said:

How do you define "good driver"?  If you are into performance driving, then you are focusing on "driving".  However, drivers out there - who btw got their licenses at the age of 16 after riding bumper cars - get punished and rewarded (by law enforcement and insurance companies who deploy OBD spy devices) for not-accelerating hard, not-decelerating hard, not having lateral accelerations in curves, as well as counting to 3 at stop signs and braking at yellow lights.  So, they may be perfect drivers by those standards and yet completely suck at "driving".  

This was just asking each person to rate themselves as a driver.  Whatever way they decided to rate themselves.

The point is, most people rate themselves higher than the should be.  Just based on that concept that only half can be average (the middle of the rating) or better.

And this was from a street, safe driving program, not a track based program.

And my experience with track driving for new drivers is NOT that they accelerate or brake hard, I look at basic driving skills.  Can they put the car in the proper place on the track surface?  Can they see what is happening ahead of them?  Can they see where the track goes?  

Going fast starts with the basics, what they lack.

Safe driving, most drivers are also bad. Actually, I see more inappropriate acceleration and braking there.  Not looking ahead and see what is going on.

[kortopates]

6 hours ago, Yetti said:

So we all agree there are pilots that should not be flying because they are going to bend metal and possibly themselves.   There is a system set up that is supposed to keep that from happening, but in reality pilots once they have their ticket are free to do as they please.   So why make the rest of us go through the steps if in the end they don't work?

They may not work 100% of the time for all of us, but I believe they work most of the time.

But you can't teach good ADM, its an attitude that a pilot must chooses to embrace and devote much attention and study too avoid falling pray to the hazardous attitudes, like get-there-itis as well as learning methods to detect and correct mistakes since we're all very vulnerable. For many of us it takes a close call or some very scary moment that causes us to make the necessary attitude adjustment; what Cliffy likes to describe as getting tempered.

But sadly for a select few pilots, it takes the FAA, or insurance companies or a Darwin award to eventually weed-out.

[jetdriven]

3 hours ago, kortopates said:

They may not work 100% of the time for all of us, but I believe they work most of the time.

But you can't teach good ADM, its an attitude that a pilot must chooses to embrace and devote much attention and study too avoid falling pray to the hazardous attitudes, like get-there-itis as well as learning methods to detect and correct mistakes since we're all very vulnerable. For many of us it takes a close call or some very scary moment that causes us to make the necessary attitude adjustment; what Cliffy likes to describe as getting tempered.

But sadly for a select few pilots, it takes the FAA, or insurance companies or a Darwin award to eventually weed-out.

Along with their screaming passengers 

[Yetti]

On 1/16/2023 at 9:20 PM, jetdriven said:

Along with their screaming passengers 

Stop Screaming I am scared too!

[201er]

On 11/27/2022 at 6:34 PM, RoundTwo said:

N201RF

Final is out:

The pilot was operating on an instrument flight rules (IFR) flight plan in dark night instrument meteorological conditions (IMC). As the pilot approached the destination airport, the air traffic controller attempted to vector him onto his requested GPS instrument approach procedure. The pilot was provided course corrections and heading changes from the controller, and was advised that the airplane before him had performed the missed approach procedure and diverted due to low cloud ceilings (200 ft above ground level [agl]).
Flight track data revealed that the airplane was consistently below published minimum altitudes throughout the approach and was 500 ft below the minimum altitude prescribed at the final approach fix. The pilot continued the descent below the lowest minimums prescribed by the approach procedure, and about 1.25 miles from the runway and left of the runway centerline, the airplane impacted and became suspended in a power line tower at an elevation about 600 ft mean sea level (msl) and 100 ft above ground level. The airport was located at an elevation of 539 ft msl.
Examination of the airplane revealed that there were no pre-impact mechanical anomalies that would have prevented normal operation.

In an interview following the accident, the pilot stated that his course diversions during the flight were the result of a mis-programmed GPS. Throughout the interview, he could not articulate the features of his IFR-certified GPS, and stated that, in many situations, he used his handheld, VFR-only GPS to avoid the “complex keystrokes needed” to operate the IFR GPS.

The pilot stated that he was not receiving vertical guidance on his GPS after intercepting the final approach course. He set an “alarm” to sound when the airplane had descended to 800 ft on the approach, but at 1,200 ft, he sighted the ground, and became focused on “keeping contact with the ground through the side window” and “pulling the airport out of the soup.” The pilot stated that he was familiar with the powerlines that he impacted and believed that he was beyond them.

The lowest altitude allowed by the approach procedure was 789 ft msl, or 269 ft agl. However, this altitude was for an approach category that provided both lateral and vertical course guidance, and the pilot stated that he was not receiving vertical guidance. Whether the lack of vertical guidance was the result of the pilot’s mis-programming of the approach procedure or because he was referring to his VFR-only GPS for guidance was not determined. The lowest altitude allowed for an approach with only lateral guidance was 980 ft msl, or 460 ft agl.

Based on the available information, the pilot became preoccupied with attempting to visually locate the runway and failed to maintain an effective scan of his instruments, which resulted in his descent below minimums, lateral deviation off the approach course, and collision with powerlines.

Probable Cause and Findings
The National Transportation Safety Board determines the probable cause(s) of this accident to be:

 The pilot’s visual flight below published altitude minimums, which resulted in collision with a powerline tower structure.

https://data.ntsb.gov/carol-repgen/api/Aviation/ReportMain/GenerateNewestReport/106368/pdf

[kortopates]

It would be great to know what actions the FAA took with the the pilot as well. Probably remedial training at the minimum and perhaps a checkride before further instrument privileges?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[PT20J]

Wow. Just, like, wow.